The World Wide Web (“web”) contains a vast amount of information. Locating a desired portion of the information, however, can be challenging. This problem is compounded because the amount of information on the web and the number of new users inexperienced at web searching are growing rapidly.
Search engines attempt to return hyperlinks to web pages in which a user is interested. Generally, search engines base their determination of the user's interest on search terms (called a search query) entered by the user. The goal of the search engine is to provide links to high quality, relevant results (e.g., web pages) to the user based on the search query. Typically, the search engine accomplishes this by matching the terms in the search query to a corpus of pre-stored web pages. Web pages that contain the user's search terms are identified as search results and are returned to the user as links.
Over the past few years, a new medium, called a blog, has appeared on the web. Blogs (short for web logs) are publications of personal thoughts that are typically updated frequently with new journal entries, called posts. The content and quality of blogs and their posts can vary greatly depending on the purpose of the authors of the blogs. As blogging becomes more popular, the ability to provide quality blog search results becomes more important.